Commissioners agreed that settling outstanding Tribal land concerns — particularly for seizures during WWII — were the responsibility of the federal government.
The Sitka Planning Commission has postponed approval of a revised historical chapter in Sitka’s Comprehensive Plan, until language can be added acknowledging that there are outstanding issues with Tribal claims.
The Planning Commission met last week (5-3-16) to review the historical chapter, and to hear a staff presentation on Sitka’s Land Use Inventory. The meeting is one of several planned through the fall to vet an all-new land use plan for Sitka for the next 15 years.
Maegan Bosak is Sitka’s director of planning and community development. Tribal concerns dominated April’s commission meeting on this topic. She says that commissioners are trying to incorporate the concerns into the revised document.
“The commission at the end decided to focus on the use, and to acknowledge those issues — again, to see how we can move forward — and create more land use opportunities in those areas.”
Commissioner Randy Hughey said that he was more comfortable acknowledging that there are unsettled Tribal land disputes, rather than promising solutions — which fell outside the scope of the planning commission.
Planning staff also presented commissioners with a draft Land Use Inventory showing some startling data: 96-percent of the City and Borough of Sitka is undeveloped, for example. And only 3-percent of privately-owned land is vacant. The second half of the meeting was devoted to visioning, says Bosak.
“Essentially we asked folks to first work individually, and then as teams, to envision how they’d like Sitka to look in 2030. So we asked, What did housing look like at that time? What problems had been solved? How did the community grow, and what were their ideal community characteristics in 2030? We got a lot of good response, a lot of good things to shoot for. So we’ll spend the next meetings creating a plan as to how we get there.”
Among the ideas generated in the visioning session were more tiny homes and more land devoted to agriculture.
The Planning Commission is focusing on a thorough revision of only the Land Use component of the Sitka Comprehensive Plan.
The next Land Use meeting will 7 PM Tuesday June 7 in the Sitka Firehall. You can find links to the Sitka Comprehensive Plan here.
